As Alberta taxpayers poured hundreds of millions of dollars every year into a program to curtail large class sizes, more and more classes across the province failed to meet government guidelines in the last 14 years.

A Postmedia analysis of a trove of data published online by Alberta Education shows that larger-than-recommended class sizes initially dropped during the first few years of targeted investments through its high-profile class size initiative.

In 2009, the trend reversed, and the number of classes meeting provincial targets dropped year after year, especially in the earliest grades. Last school year, 81 per cent of Kindergarten to Grade 3 classes were larger than those outlined in provincial guidelines.

For years, the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) has asked government to release this information — which the education ministry did late last June in response to a critical report from the province’s auditor general and just weeks after a Postmedia investigation examining ballooning class sizes in Alberta’s three biggest cities.

Despite investing $3.3 billion since 2004 into the class-size initiative, students may be worse off now than they were in the early years of the program, ATA president Greg Jeffery said last week.

“I started to think how teachers are going to feel when this gets out in front of them,” Jeffery said of the data. “They’re frustrated now, and I think they’re going to be agitated.”

Although he doesn’t like to use the term ‘cap,’ Jeffery said it’s time the class-size guidelines created in 2003 by the Alberta Commission on Learning (ACOL) became requirements.

Schools shouldn’t be penalized for missing the mark, he said. They should have to justify to the education minister why they can’t hit the target.

Teachers’ strike prompted guidelines

Alberta’s class-size guidelines were laid down in the wake of an acrimonious teachers’ strike.

The commission left the targets as recommendations, not caps, to allow school boards some flexibility.

Since then, school districts and the government have only publicly reported class-size averages, which the auditor general critiqued in February 2018 for obscuring the range of class sizes and masking the reality of classroom conditions.

Super-sized classes

The trend toward ballooning classes in Edmonton, Red Deer and Calgary holds true provincewide. Both the number and proportion of large classes have grown with time, according to the data.

In 2004, for example, just one per cent of the classes had 35 or more children registered. By 2015, it had jumped to 2.6 per cent of classes. In the 2017-18 school year (the most recent year that statistics are available), 2.4 per cent of classes had 35 or more students.

Also in 2017, there were two and a half times more classes with 40 or more kids compared to 13 years earlier.

The increase in big classes was even more dramatic when looking at just “core” academic classes such as math, science, language arts and social studies.

The proportion of core classes with 35 or more kids increased more than three and a half times over the 14 years, and the proportion of classes with 40 or more students is nearly six times larger than it was 14 years ago.

Some of these measures peaked between 2013 and 2015 and have since decreased slightly when analyzed provincewide.

Large groups are not limited to high schools. Despite the commission recommendation of 17 children in early elementary classes, the data listed 472 K-3 classes with more than 30 students in the 2017-18 school year. Although many of the classes were physical education or music, some were not. They included two kindergarten classes of 42 and 43 students in Lethbridge, and a Grade 3 math class of 35 at Calder Elementary School — in Education Minister David Eggen’s riding.

Teachers also have said their classes are becoming more complex, with growing numbers of English language learners and students with disabilities.

Although the online data does not include the numbers of students with exceptional needs, Alberta Education provided those numbers for the 14-year period. Although some schools are moving away from applying codes to students with disabilities, the ratio of coded students to classes has grown steadily during that time.

Tracking dollars

Despite government instructions in 2011 to channel class-size reduction dollars solely to early elementary grades and high school trades, more K-3 classes exceed guidelines than in any other grade group.

A challenge, Eggen said, was the 22 per cent enrolment growth in Alberta public and charter schools since 2004. Some districts are recording more than two per cent growth per year, and some as high as five or six per cent, he said.

The government funded schools for that growth, which put 3,600 more teachers in classrooms during the last four years. It also funded 240 school construction projects to make more room. But keeping up with the growth during an economic downtown and sluggish oil revenues isn’t easy, he said.

Eggen introduced a new requirement in early November he hopes will help. Schools must now report how they spent class-size dollars, in which grades, and how many teachers they hired with that money. In combination with class-size data, it will help analysts identify hot spots, he said.

He acknowledges better tracking alone won’t solve the problem and hasn’t eliminated the possibility of hard caps on class size “in some circumstances.”

A Supreme Court ruling in British Columbia that compelled the government to cap class sizes prompted it to spend $72 million more in their 2018 budget to hire more teachers. That approach seems “arbitrary,” Eggen said, explaining he wants a more affordable solution.

‘Lost in the mix’

Future plans are less helpful to the students in large classes today. Calgary parent Cassandra Raugust has two teens in Central Memorial High School, where her kids’ academic class sizes range from 35 to 43 students.

Elijah, 15, gets almost no one-on-one help from teachers, she said. The transgender teen is also bullied in math class, where kids taunt, throw food and spew spitballs, she said last week.

“The teacher doesn’t even notice,” Raugust said.

Her 18-year-old son Damon needs help with math that he’s not getting at school, and she can’t afford to pay a tutor, she said.

When she heard about the increases in large class sizes, Raugust said it seems the government is not taking the class-size guidelines seriously.

“I’d like to be able to see that my kids aren’t lost in the mix,” she said.

Beyond class size

Although the education minister has said he considers the Alberta Commission on Learning’s class guidelines valid today, a University of Calgary education professor said much has changed in the 15 years since they were established.

Eugene Kowch, chair of the education leadership, policy & governance unit at the Werklund School of Education, said earlier this month teaching methods are moving away from an instructor standing at the front of rows of desks and delivering lectures.

Planning more group and hands-on activities is more work up front for teachers, but students tend to be more engaged and act out less, which makes teaching more efficient, he said.

He said research about the effect of class size on student outcomes has been inconclusive, whereas good teaching does make a difference.

Teachers used to be masters of their domain, and now they must accept they can’t be experts in everything students need, he said. Instead of divvying students into smaller groups and hiring more classroom teachers, it would be more efficient for a school district — or districts — to have a team of specialists that can rapidly respond to individual students’ needs, he said.

Although class size and composition does matter — particularly for teacher workload and job satisfaction — investing in a flexible team that can roam between classes and schools as students need them might be more cost-effective, he said.

“It isn’t as much about the size of the class,” he said. “It’s about getting the right support to get the teaching and learning done. That takes real teamwork.”

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